At this point, I measure every curriculum on the specific amount of time/support students receive in exploring and developing their own personal approaches to writing, reading, math and social interaction.

Most come out around 0%. Those that claim to highlight it might hit 5% If you are a math teacher, do the math: what percentage of your time is students identifying their own contextualized problems and developing approaches?

Of course, we should all agree policing is a fascist/racist/ableist/classist institution created to inflict violence on oppressed groups. And police actually protecting people is them just doomed freelancing.

But teachers protecting students is the also doomed freelancing. Absolutely more teachers buck the system to help young people and the consequences for careers-especially if the teacher is white-are less dire.

But what do you think is happening when families come and most teachers read eugenic test scores at them and provoke shame and tears?

Let's talk about what happened in Chicago today.

#LoriLockout
#ChicagoLockout🧵 Over the past 3 days, @ctulocal1 leadership has engaged parents, students, medical professionals and educators. This has been conducted via conferencing, social media, one to ones, etc.

And has been on-going before that.

After travel and being able to calculate the chaos, I had to take Monday off to stay with my daughter and another student. On Tuesday, another parent watched them while I went to school in a full cyberpunk environment suit. On Monday and Tuesday, while a teacher was out and quarantined, Sprout's class was close contacted the entire day.

Meanwhile, my class had lots of coughing and sniffles, but no positive cases.

The "school closings destroyed the lives of millions of kids and it was mostly kids of color" crowd seriously beliefs that all of us in these communities did nothing for our kids for two years and that our humanity comes from proximity to middle class whiteness. This ignores that again and again it was families of color who CORRECTLY figured out that municipal leaderships were not to be trusted to value our lives during a global pandemic.

If you want to replicate the lesson I did today. Grab some color pencils. Go to the Chicago COVID tracker (or the community you want to study).

Graph in different colors the infection rates per population of AAPI, Black, Latin@, and white.

Now do deaths. At this point, the students worked on different things.
You can also pull vaccination access rates by community.
You can graph ICU and acute care by "COVID" "Non-COVID" and "Available"

You can graph incarceration rate by race/class/disability and infection/death rates.

A reminder while @ISBEnews actively pushes another racist policy that they have no branch office in the largest district in the state of Illinois that also happens to serve an 89% non-white population. People might try to imply that Rauner had a hand in this--I'm sure he made it worse--but almost exactly ten years ago, under a Democratic governors, @ISBEnews supported and defended a raise in the "Cut score" that DQed approximately 90% of candidates of color from teaching.

As my students marinate over last night's events, I want to share a few guidelines for covering racist atrocities. They are not comprehensive nor perfect--they are just things I've relied on in moments like now and I thought they might help someone.
#StopAAPIHate I won't be able to answer or provide links immediately, as I will be stopping to support student work (of course). But I will try to answer some questions later.

Wow, 4th grade math was incredible today.

It turns out that if you provide space to dream answers, 4th graders will melt mundane mode problems into universal design. "If they are only allowing one ingredient, we should ask people to find the mode and then order pizzas of that ingredient and some more as 'no topping' and then get other toppings at the store so everyone can eat."